Hyper Light Breaker‘s recent Early Access release was highly anticipated by fans of Heart Machine’s breakout isometric pixel art action RPG Hyper Light Drifter. After following up from Hyper Light Drifter with Solar Ash and its unique rail-grinding movement system, the studio has shown a talent for experimenting with fresh ideas. This has continued with Hyper Light Breaker, as although it shares its world with Drifter, it’s a wildly different take on the setting. Shifting from the solitary single-player adventure, Hyper Light Breaker is instead a 3D, open-world, multiplayer roguelite with multiple player characters, a procedurally generated Overgrowth to explore, and myriad weapons and upgrades to utilize.
Hyper Light Breaker has been met with mixed reviews—it’s Heart Machine’s first go at releasing a game as Early Access—but the team has been closely listening to feedback and set aside ample development time and resources to address it swiftly while the game works through its work-in-progress state. To give players an idea of how the game will shape up over the next year, Heart Machine has revealed an ambitious roadmap for Hyper Light Breaker highlighting its development plans. In an interview with Game Rant, Hyper Light Breaker lead producer Michael Clark and community manager Yiyi Zhang spoke about the importance of player feedback along with the content and changes that will be arriving. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Player Feedback is Helping Guide Hyper Light Breaker’s Direction
Q: Now that the game has been in players’ hands, what do you feel is most important to focus your efforts on? Is this something that has shifted since Early Access launch?
Clark: We “held space” in our planning for reacting to player feedback, so most of our roadmap highlights aren’t going to push backward. We assumed (correctly!) that we’d want to spend a lot of time reacting to player feedback around balancing and tuning the game as well as squashing bugs—so you’ll see significant changes in the next few monthly updates around those goals.
Q: How has player feedback influenced the upcoming roadmap content? Are there certain things on the way that are a response to what players have been saying?
Clark: We are moving up a more robust tutorial and onboarding process as that has been a major fan request. We’re also looking at what sort of gameplay changes and features we can introduce that improve the overall flow of the game. We’ve seen a lot of passionate feedback around this, and it’s something folks can expect to see more of in the coming months.
Q: What item on the roadmap are you most excited for players to experience?
Zhang: From a community manager’s perspective, I’m excited for players to experience all the things they’ve been (politely) clamoring for—wish fulfillment stuff. In our community Discord, there’s a trend of folks changing their usernames to ‘Username – ___ lover’ with the blank filled in by what people are most hype about.
We have folks excited by any incoming character with a big tail (tail lover), things with horns (horn lover), and a very healthy, vocal contingent of people who really want Crows. It’s wild how enthusiastic our players get about very specific things, and it’s going to be such a joy for them to finally experience all the things they’ve been waiting for!
Q: Since Early Access launch, has anything particularly surprised you about what players have done in the game?
Zhang: In general, our players are very impressive gamers. They really like to dig in, and they like to break things. That’s great for us because they push the boundaries of everything we’ve built, helping us identify areas to explore and expand that we might not have thought of and fill gaps that we hadn’t noticed.
I set up a #hlb-git-gud channel in our Discord specifically for highlighting some of the wonderful, hilarious exploits players have discovered in their various playthroughs: discovering that you can parry fall damage (and heal from it!), doing a pop shove-it on the hoverboard, and various ways to get insane attack and movement speed. We’re constantly surprised by the antics they get up to.
Q: Can you talk about ways the Overgrowth will be expanding in the future?
Clark: Later this spring we’ll be expanding the Overgrowth with new areas to access. We’ll be able to talk about them more in the future, but if you look around the Overgrowth right now, you’ll see signs of where these new—or rather, currently inaccessible—areas will be.
As we continue through Early Access, players can expect to see more points of interest added to existing biomes and new locations that expand the total playable size of the Overgrowth.
New Characters and Weapons are Coming to Hyper Light Breaker
Q: What can you say about the new characters/classes coming to the game? Can you talk about their playstyles and what they bring to the table?
Clark: Our next playable character is more of a glass cannon, high-risk, high-reward character. You can expect to see more differentiation and larger variance between characters in the future.
Q: The roadmap mentions rebalancing. Can you talk about aspects of the game’s balance that you’re looking to refine?
Clark: Overall we’re looking to make it easier for players to get in and get their feet wet before the challenge ramps up. We’ve tuned a lot of enemies and gear to this end, and we have improvements to the player’s parry and changes to how some different moves ‘cancel’ out of other moves to make them snappier and more responsive. There’s a lot more, but we’ll save all the details for the patch notes on release!
Q: Are there any details about the new Assassin that you can share?
Clark: Our next Assassin is a master duelist sporting some weapons that should seem familiar to our Early Access players.
Q: More weapons are also planned. Can you reveal any details about what that entails? Are these all-new weapon types, or existing weapon types with interesting new modifiers?
Clark: We will be expanding the player’s arsenal of Blades and Rails throughout Early Access. When we tease new weapons, we mean entirely new weapons with new attacks and combos, unique abilities, et cetera. We treat the Affixes—the gear modifiers that spawn on each piece of gear—as separate from the weapon itself, and while we’ll have more of those in this next update and likely every update from here on out, a new weapon involves much more!
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- Developer(s)
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Heart Machine
- Publisher(s)
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Arc Games